Chapter 89

In transport with the dwarven military, location transient;

 

It turns out the dwarves are great benefactors. They are also generous with sharing their supplies too. It’s also thankful their supplies are much better quality than you’d expect in a medieval economy.

But it has a price. We end up being assigned to one of the patrols to back up their troops to help guard it and act as ‘troops’. It works well. But I wonder what will happen once we are inside one of their cities?

In a matter of a few days, we fall into a routine of helping them clear out goblin caverns on their way back to the capital area. We mostly are used as backups and they have let me assign Rina and Asakura to be my bodyguards, so that they don’t have to be on the front line, nor be separated from me. The first day with them it seems we had a lot of orientation meetings, and of course resting up that was boring to talk about.

But until we found that out we were a bit scared they’d separate us.

On day 2, we were assigned to a patrol to circle a dwarven hamlet in a special mountain range on the surface that had reports of goblin scouting. We arrived on the scene to find that a large goblin force had surrounded the place and were trying to dig under their wall.

With the dwarven heavy armor units, the siege was broken in less than an hour and we hardly even had to do anything or lift a finger while the efficient golem heavy armors with dwarves inside did all the work. I’m impressed with them and curious how they work. Rather than an electrical system it seems to be some kind of mana enchant tool technology by the look of them but I doubt the dwarves will let me study them out up close. Ingvarrin later told me it’s called golem armor suit worn by a living dwarf pilot inside it like a mechanical suit that looks almost like it’s part steam engine or something.

That showed us even more about the superior dwarven technology than they realized just from the explanation. It turns out not only are the dwarves good at smithing, but they have a lot of enchanter type magic users among them. They power the dwarven military equipment with rune and enchantment schools of magic, and rune like batteries that they recharge daily, or more if they have too. They normally use a type of automated crossbow that only dwarves have. They have to reload every shot by hand, but can pre-load four shots at once, and then close to melee range.

The complexity of their technology as me confused. I thought this was a medieval world? But their equipment is impressive. It seems almost like some kind of appearance from all of that together that looks a bit like steampunk? But nothing else on this world seemed to even be remotely close to the dwarves so far.

So they must be ahead of the other civilizations and not the norm for this world is what my hypothesis so far is. So far this idea is holding up. I wanted to see that more and get more information but the dwarves won’t let me; they want to protect their technological superiority. They seem to be very afraid of letting other races steal or see their technology. That probably is a valid fear, after seeing how they tear up little goblins in a series of skirmishes over the next few days.

This type of unit is really worth the effort in a sacrifice or effort to study more. I’m thinking if I study how they enchant; it will help me to work on spells and spellwork crafting and get more ideas of how magic tools work and can be made. Although I’m sure it’s worth investigating. But because we’d been critically exhausted I hadn’t had the dream state activate the last two days. So I wasn’t able to ask yet.

We see the dwarven golem armors are much like the tanks or knights of this medieval system. They easily can crush twenty goblins each solo in a very short amount of time with very little exposure to the person inside.

After running off the goblins though we had to deal with their weak spot. The golem armors move a bit slow, and so it’s easy for goblins to escape them if they can live through the initial attack. They also need a bit of time to recharge after battles and each day need some kind of mana injections, from what I can gather. That means they each have a few support staff running around caring for them between tasks and resting periods.

That’s when they sent in our patrol. We thought we would have been done for the day but this turns out to be a type of interception skirmish to prevent the goblins from reaching another settlement. It was a quick mop up of the goblin patrols, which did little or nothing to stop us from following their tracks. Then we were able to identify their base. At that point the patrols pulled back and they sent in the heavy armors again.

By nightfall we’d fought two battles and killed several hundred goblins each among a whole group of us and dwarves together. It was easy work and not very stressful since we had the runic shielding up. I even tried an experiment of trying to put my own runic shielding on over an already enchanted heavy armor to see what would happen. Of course before beginning I also checked to try to make sure no harm could occur.

The spell fizzled the first few times. But I’m not sure why. Is it because it already has a type of rune shielding?

I’ll have to try again later and see how to work it out to make it work. Or maybe it’s just totally maxxed out in how much mana charge it can carry with all of its workings already in place?

Later we met for training with Ingvarrin, in a separate tent the next morning with other people.

“Morning.” He greeted us with a crisp salute. We let him start things off because we aren’t sure what he wanted in the beginning.

“Dwarves seem like military culture don’t they?” Rina whispered in my ear before I could say anything.

“Morning,” we answered back.

He kept greeting us each personally as we went into a large officer mess tent. It was big enough to hold about twenty officers at once. We were then given trays of food. We all introduced ourselves one by one as we set down our trays to eat.

Our mouths water when we see it. It’s like potatoes and gravy and even smells like it.

Oh damn. They have good food too?

After those military rations while being stuck in the cave I didn’t realize it could be this good. It’s like a small feast and the cook must be someone with real top notch skills. I’m very thankful, because I’d been worried that living in a medieval world might mean having to eat garbage. This isn’t the case. It’s true what they say that food can lift your spirits.

The girls are crying for joy, for the chance to have good food.

“I’ve never seen such beautiful food,” Rina says in awe. If she talked like that every day of course I’d be worried about her ballooning up in weight.

No comment from Asakura…but there is a good facial reaction and some kind of happy sigh.

And then suddenly Rina has an outburst, “I am sooo going to get fat if we eat like this every day!”

“You better not,” I warned her. It gives me a bad feeling hearing it. She wouldn’t really pig out and get fat would she? Some people do after their teen years are ended…

She replied with a smirk and stuck her tongue out at me. What a kid…really…

Ingvarrin chuckles hearing it, “glad you like our food,” he nodded.

I didn’t realize it before, but the dwarves like to mix their meals and their information sharing meetings during the same time. It also promotes good feeling to share the good positive feeling of the food while they listen to each other. Of course if it’s important information they may ask you to repeat back to them what your understanding is, it seems. Rina was caught flat footed after he described the military tent parking organization and she couldn’t repeat it back at one point in the conversation.

There are others in the tent besides us, but it seems this meeting was just for us and Ingvarrin with a few observers and a couple of female secretary dwarves that are also in military uniforms. Because they look a bit older and I already have Asakura, I’m not too much interested in them at the moment.

“So I have good news, and bad news,” he said to us.

Asakura looks at me expectantly. Is she expecting me to hit him or something? She still stays quiet.

Rina stops chewing her food immediately. She looks up expecting the worst.

“What?” I asked. I have my silverware in my hand. Is this going to ruin the meal?

“Well the bad news first. It will be a slight delay on our route to take you to the capital. It seems that there’s been an emergency signal activated by the town mage at a community two days from here. We will proceed to intercept and provide support as necessary.”

“So is that such a bad thing?” Rina asked.

“The capital would have a good chance for us to get good information and get started in this area. I hope the delay won’t be too long. We need an area that has a good staging point where we can figure out what’s going on in this…continent,” I said to him earnestly. I’d been thinking ‘world’ rather than ‘continent’ when I said it to him, but saying it like that might raise a lot of problems for us, if they don’t think we’re locals.

“It seems like there’s a lot of skirmishes going on? Are you in a war?” I asked.

He shrugged, “we live next to a sizable goblin kingdom. Its not really a full on out war, but a never ending series of skirmishes.”

The capital would have the best resources for technology, magic, communication and news on local events is what I’m thinking.

“Sorry,” he gave me an apologetic look.

I also wonder about it. Is this a genuine delay or is he trying to get gas mileage with us being put to use?

“It’s not a big deal really. But we are the main combat army for the Southern part of the kingdom. It means we have to immediately intercept such signals as soon as they go up. We anticipate that this will probably be like the goblin siege that we’d just done. It will be short work and we’ll mop them up quickly and easily,” he shrugged it off like it was nothing.

“You know the goblins are pretty smart. I don’t think you should underestimate them. Thinking you can take them out whenever with hardly any effort is dangerous,” I warned.

He nodded, “actually I totally agree with you. A false sense of security actually invites danger and disaster. But we’ve done hundreds of goblin interception missions in the last year and a half. That’s how much activity we’ve had recently. It’s like every day we have at least a minor skirmish.”

“Di-did you j-just say hundreds?” Rina’s mouth fell open in shock.

“Yes,” came the response.

We looked at each other, thinking the same thing…

“So are most of those hundreds of engagements large battles or small?” I asked turning back to the dwarf who is looking serious.

Ingvarrin nodded, “it could be just two or three goblins or a whole squad or more. Because it varies so much we say the average engagement is a squad of ten to twenty. But there are sometimes big battles too.”

I look at Asakura hoping she might figure out something, but then I remember she’s in her sleepy kid mode. I keep hoping for the old her to wake up.

Rina whistled, “That’s a lot; but why so many? That’s a boat load of activity. You aren’t just having a minor diversion but a whole active war and war campaign aren’t you?”

Long silence…

Ingvarrin sighed, “Yeah I can tell it won’t help to sugar coat things. Because you are outsiders you have to be escorted to the capital until you can gain a residency permit too. But we are in an all out war at the moment too.”

“So that means we’ll probably never get to the capital,” I grumbled.

Ingvarrin’s face scrunched up. “That’s really the question isn’t it? For the last year every day there are more and more of them to fight. Their numbers keep going up also. We’re not sure either how or why but they just keep increasing in numbers that they’ve sustained over time. Our country’s defense spending budget is really stressed out right now and being put to the test. But the number of skirmishes per week has more than doubled. We’re also facing bigger numbers per skirmish than we used to.”

“What do you think it means?” he asked me.

“Are they all from the same area though? What if there are new groups coming in from ‘outside of town’? Have you been able to identify if it’s only local goblin clans or if neighboring tribes have also been pulled into this?” I suggested.

“Well I’m not a goblin expert. I have a security adviser that handles that. I don’t dwell on their ecology as much as how to kill them. But I’ll forward your questions to him and get back to you on that,” he said.

Weird reaction…why didn’t he answer it? They must have some idea right?

Rina paused to cut up a small piece of jerky and dip in gravy. “Hmm, this is so good. Meeting or not, I have to eat this with thanks.”

I ignored her comment.

How can she think about food when we’re talking about our lives on the line?

Ingvarrin finally broke through his charade, and scratches his chin, “Well to be honest…I shouldn’t withhold information. You technically don’t have security clearance yet, but I think it will just hamper our effort to keep you in the dark. I can see you are smart people. We have seen a lot of new banners recently. You could be on to something. Some of the banners weren’t local heraldry that we’d seen before.”

Turns out from what we can tell with our meetings with Ingvarrin, there is like a huge territory war that broke out awhile ago between the dwarves, the goblins, and the orcs. It had been going on for years, but they just didn’t have battles every day and nobody was ever signing treaties or anything. We learn that ten years ago there might be two or three battles per year, and then like clockwork it slowly started to increase.

“You’re a mage aren’t you?” I suddenly asked him with arms crossed.

He paused for a bit and looks at me seriously. After a sigh, he nods. “Just don’t circulate that fact around please. It’s hushed up for a reason and I’m a ‘hidden piece’ so to speak. There’s a lot of talk about mage hunters recently too. With already being involved with the goblin and orc conflicts I don’t need any extra attention other than my already full plate.”

“Got it,” I replied.

“Wait, so you said goblin and orc conflicts. So the goblins are in league with the orcs? Are you fighting them as one or like two wars at the same time?” Rina asked.

If you could get her to stop playing around and from being mischievous Rina could actually be smart sometimes. This was one of those rare few moments. It was a valid question.

“Actually yes. They’ve been in league for awhile and working in concert. Why do you ask?” he looked at me pointedly.

I explain my worry about our fear of having led the goblins to the gnome warrens, after which he sighed.

“To be honest, we’d been trying to get those gnomes evacuated for years. The warren was economically stable and viable for income, but they’d neglected the defenses for too long. The perimeters, the gate system, lack of moat, no professional soldier’s barracks, and lack of heavy armors guarding the place had the dwarf king trying to pull his hair out for years. We’d warned them about it several times and they wouldn’t upgrade anything. We’d even offered to help subsidize their defense spending on a relocation option. We were rejected several times.”

We all breathed a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness. We were so afraid we’d led them into trouble,” I said sniffling. It feels like a huge load has been lifted from me emotionally.

Asakura starts to scratch my back for comfort. She somehow picked up on my emotional stress.

“I guess that means they are like some kind of gnome version of those hippy camps of carefree drug people in America,” Rina hissed.

Hmm I hadn’t thought of the gnomes exactly like that, but maybe she was right. I didn’t want her to get the dwarves mad though. I hurriedly shushed her so we could continue.

Ingvarrin continues, “No, you didn’t do anything wrong. The colony was simply too exposed. Its location was also discovered over ten years ago anyway by the enemy and was far from a reinforcement town in addition to the other problems. It was a matter of time before it fell. We’d offered an alternate location to the gnomes many times, with upgraded defenses even. They kept ignoring, insisting that place was sacred to them. A lot of good it did them in the end.”

I still feel bad in the back of my throat. I couldn’t help remember the time Asakura and I were playing with gnome children when she’d first confessed her love to me. That place would be special to me even though it was a place of tragedy.

He continued, “So back to the matter at hand, we will get you to the capital eventually. But there’s a good chance that we receive distress signals from the various dwarven colonies around us in the next few weeks. If things keep up the way they have been, I wouldn’t be surprised if we have to intercept four or five goblin raiding groups before it happens. But we will get you to the capital.”

“So is that supposed to be the good news or the bad news?” I asked. It sounded like both.

“You know there’s something I’ve been wanting to ask this whole time. Why did the dwarven caravan people blow up the gnomes’ cavern? Could there have been a better way to finish things?” Rina asked, banging her fist on the foldup table. It shakes and then some of her gravy spills a small dribble on the table. It’s lucky that she didn’t spill my gravy or there would be hell to pay for that…

The other nearby dwarves regard her coolly with patience. Her loud outburst didn’t help any.

“Actually that’s a good question,” I said aloud. I hadn’t been dwelling on it lately because we survived.

Ingvarrin sighed, “You know there were approximately three thousand goblins killed in that bomb. It was already given that the ‘ship is sinking’ and all we could do to have a chance to survive. The team that tried to help was also mostly wounded and with limited supplies. The bomb was their last card left to play. If they hadn’t done it, you wouldn’t be alive and neither would they.”

He paused to let it sink in. Until he said that I also didn’t realize how big a magnitude that explosion was. To kill that many it must have had area calculations.

“Three thousand?!” I exclaimed.

Rina looks at me stiffly, “that’s a lot Shun…”

“So you understand how many that is?” Ingvarrin asked us in confirmation.

“Yeah, it’s just that bombs are kind of controversial aren’t they?” Rina asked.

“Why should we fear to protect our people? They are orcs and goblins. You can’t reason with them. They have demon blood in them also, so they aren’t good for anything at all but destruction and violence,” Ingvarrin was being patient with her because she was a girl…

“There’s no way we could have fought three thousand and lived,” I said finally.

Asakura leaned her head against me, seemingly uninterested. It was also like how a kid would act in the same situation. She keeps her head on my shoulder.

“Uh, so if there were that many?” Rina is reasoning the logic aloud.

“It was basically a triage situation right?” I asked him.

He nodded slowly. “We regret any loss of life in the bombing but it was a total loss scenario. The problem though was without the bomb, there was no chance for anyone to escape. You were already completely surrounded. We could only hope that the bomb would blind them and cut off parts of the tunnel enough to lead out a few survivors. There were also enough goblins that we wouldn’t have been able to stop them from killing everyone. It goes without saying that we didn’t mean for part of the cavern to collapse. Our engineers had rated that cavern a few years earlier as being supported enough to withstand that magnitude of force but they were partly wrong.”

“But how do we know that’s real and this isn’t just after the fact talk defending the decision?” Rina asked.

Ingvarrin nodded, “I thought you might say something like that. We also have a system in place for things like that too, in order to be sure. Suffice it to say, dwarves engineers and towns have a defense rating system we use to determine if we consider a town to be livable. Unlike humans who solely base that on if there is food and soil for growing crops, we have a rigorous checklist for what has to happen for a town to be considered defendible enough to have a town charter. The gnomes had been disciplined several times for not following the charter.”

“Ah,” Rina and I looked at each other; we both remembered the vast trash piles of alcohol bottles we’d seen in their colony.

“But the rescue force here could easily kill that many goblins,” Rina protested weakly.

“And didn’t arrive until two days after the fact; you still would have perished. It was a situation of sacrifice a little to gain something instead of nothing. I’m sorry it wasn’t a perfect situation, but there was no other way. I do need to remind you this is a war with the goblins trying to genocide us every year and so we don’t have the luxury of being ‘nice’. We had our best people on it,” he said.

“When you say you had your best people, what do you mean by that?” I asked.

“I’m saying that mages remotely messaging back and forth through magic telepathy did a calculation based on the best data they could throw together and determined this was the only way to save anyone,” he explained.

“Wow they can do that for how long of a distance?” I asked.

“Good question. Is there a range limit on mage contact spells?” Rina ended up asking for me and beating me on the draw.

Ingvarrin sighed, “humans are so curious…you take a lot of energy just to talk to. I’m not an expert on that type of spell and energy system, so it’s better if you ask others but there are limits to mage contact spell distances. Every single mile adds a huge mana burden so you can’t just go infinite distance and talk to someone on the other side of the world. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah thanks for clarifying,” Rina said nodding.

It’s actually good she asked for me. It would raise suspicions about our background and origins if I asked something even a low level mage should already have known.

“How did they do the calculation?” I asked.

“Have you ever heard of divination type magic?” he asked.

I think Fox had mentioned it as one of the schools of focus. I didn’t know much about it though, and so I told him as such.

He nodded, “dwarves aren’t as good at magic, as some races.”

“Eh? Is that so?” I said in surprise. They seem pretty good so far…so I gave him a funny look which he picked up on immediately.

“You also like to hide your strengths and maybe look weak on purpose?” I added with a smirk.

He looked sour for a moment but then scratched his head, “Well let me rephrase that. We can barely get mages at all really because of a lower occurrence of mage births per population, happening in our genes; but they aren’t lower in power or strength compared to others. But what we do get, are really good.”

“I didn’t know dwarves weren’t as many per population compared to other races in terms of new mages being born. Nobody told me that,” I said.

He strangely looked proud and had a strange twinkle in his eye, “except for enchantment, divination, and earth elements which we get about as many of those as other races to make up for the losses in other branches. Actually we probably get a higher birth per population ratio of those than other races but those types of magics aren’t always fully offensive until the person matures greatly and gains a lot of skills. Those three we can go toe to toe with any other magic element focus and easily win once we can get them off their feet and spoon fed skills while growing up in the right environment though it’s a long difficult road. We just don’t have a lot of the showy fire magicians and the others that all the humans and others seem really focused on.”

Now things were making more sense. He wasn’t trying to deceive us earlier after all but just had a complicated situation.

“So do dwarves have on mage birth population rates of other peoples and tribes of this world?” I asked.

He raised an eyebrow. Too late, I realized I shouldn’t have attached that phrase of ‘of this world’. I bit my lip.

“We have some information as you’ve said but not everything and this is a really big world. Of the different races of this world, in order of number and quality of magicians it’s believed that first and foremost dragons reign supreme both in overall power and strength but also 100% of their population wields magic, followed by demons not too far behind with most having at least one magic skill that is in some way more offensive, then elves which are now believed to be extinct except for maybe dark elves, humans have a bit of a gap between them; with dwarves believed to be last. But we make up for it, with coupling magic with technology, and none of the others can do that.”

“Elves are extinct?! That’s so sad. I wanted to meet one and maybe be its friend,” Rina cried out.

“Elves aren’t that friendly actually even if we did find one for you today,” Ingvarrin shrugged.

“Oh.”

“But they did have actually a ton of magic, but much of it was useless and had little practical battle application. We think that contributed to their downfall and that’s why they are rated below demons in magic power,” he explained.

“Ah, I get it,” I nodded.

He suddenly was opening my mind to a whole bunch of interesting ideas. What if…

“At any rate, let’s get back on track. That was the bad news. The good news is, we’ve found other human survivor groups,” Ingvarrin said.

We’re so surprised we end up holding our breath.

What do we say?

What if it’s Yuta’s group? Or Akimoto’s squad? But there could be a chance for someone like Akira to make it through alive right? But come to think of it those were only survivor groups that I knew of. There might also be a possibility of it being something entirely unpredictable after that. What if by chance I ran into something like a splinter survivor group from Sunghee’s Korean people, or maybe if some other smaller group had managed to pull of its own survival group from the initial orc attack by itself? There could even be a Kenji and undead minions group posing as humans, but not really being alive and healthy.

We’re too surprised to know what to say right away.

I want to avoid them, but part of me is a little bit curious how they’ve fared.